A Crumpled Piece of Paper
January 17, 2001
7:22 a.m.
The book progresses, and I think I'm getting into the groove a bit. Life conspires against, but then, it conspires against anything that fights entropy. This shall pass. I expect. Lisa has been on this crash job for the past week, working 10 and 14 hour days. She got an emergency package to tack onto the back of it yesterday, so I came home just a tad early in order to get Brigid to her piano lessons. Brigid has stated that it is her goal to be as musical as she can be, and so she's looking at other instruments to learn besides the piano and guitar. We're not mentioning the drums at this stage. [grin ] Anyway -- I piled her into the car, and we took off to her lessons. She was clutching a piece of paper in her hand, and asked "Do you want me to read you what Laura and I are working on?" There is only one answer to this kind of question, by the way. "Sure," I said. And she proceeded to relate an encyclopedia-like description of the stars and how they were born and lived. Now, mind you, these weren't factual. They were fancifully made up, a situation they wanted to make clear. But it was two full pages of diagrams and narrative about families of stars and their lives. Blue stars, red stars, white stars, black holes. Lots of fun. "We're going to publish it out of LB," she said. "LB?" "Laura/Brigid." "Ah." And I shut up and listened the rest of the way. She left the page in the car when she went into the house her piano teacher works out of. It sat on her seat, all crumpled and not neat at all. Something felt wonderful about it. something not associated with the childlike playfulness that was certainly there, and that I certainly drank up. But there was something else. Something that just now really came into my mind. Maybe this is why I chose to write about yesterday's event. I don't know. I didn't have it in mind when I started. But maybe I chose this topic specifically to get to the bottom of my daughter's lesson. I don't know. But what I sensed in that page was freedom. These two girls were free to write whatever they wanted. They were free to color it, or draw on it. They weren't worried right then about the paper, or the neatness of their wording. They weren't doing it for school, or for scouts, or for any one of a million other reasons. Instead, they were creating. Freely creating. Just because they wanted to. And what came out was naturally wonderful. So when I sat down this morning I was thinking of that piece of paper, and what it meant to me. It's not surprising that I had a good morning.   Have a good day.  Bet you can't beat her into the novel market... Daily Persistence is © Ron Collins |
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I began to write 10,000 words a day Barbara Cartland author of over 704 books |
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